A Serving of Scandal

by Prue Leith

  Andrea closed the show with a rolling backwards somersault off Toppy’s tail. She landed as acrobats do, bum out, knees together, neatly, hands out to steady herself. Then she ran to Scilla, who had gathered up the long lunge rein and stood holding Toppy. She and Andrea bowed together. Then the rest of the team joined them and they all bowed again.

  Oliver, clapping and shouting ‘Bravo!’ put his arm round Ruth’s thin shoulders. Hugging her to him, he said, ‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’

  Ruth laughed at him, but it was a friendly, happy laugh. ‘They both are,’ she said. ‘You should see Mattie. She’s absolutely fearless. If we could afford the horses, she could be a champion.’

  Oliver did not like the idea of a serious professional rider for a daughter, and was relieved that Ruth didn’t expect an answer. She had walked over to collect Andrea’s pony, being fussed over by a group of girls.

  That night at supper all the talk was about horses: shows, jumping, dressage, hunting, polo. Andrea was highly indignant that Scilla had not let her do her backwards handstand dismount, or even the forwards one. ‘She’s so mean. Why couldn’t I do it? I’ve done it before! Loads of times.’

  ‘But the somersault was wonderful, darling,’ said Oliver.

  ‘And “loads of times” was mostly on the barrel, or the gym horse, not on Toppy,’ said Ruth. ‘How many times have you done it on Toppy?’

  ‘Besides,’ said Mattie, not waiting for her sister to answer, ‘you’d have hogged the show, and it’s meant to be a team effort. You’re such a show-off.’

  It was good to see them all so animated, but Oliver could not maintain much interest in the marvels of Marjorie Someone’s state-of-the-art horse box, or the sad fate of some pony he’d never heard of. His few attempts at changing the subject were a failure. As he cleared the plates and brought the pudding he wondered ruefully how he’d managed to marry a horse breeder and beget a pair of horse-mad daughters.

  He looked across at Ruth, wondering if she ever felt the unease he so often did. It had been a good day. What had he to complain of? He could not say he was disappointed with his life. He was in the Cabinet, damn it, in a top job. They had a lovely house and enough money to live in middle-class comfort. He had a beautiful wife who cared for his healthy daughters. All were doing well, happy with the life they had. No one was depressed, on drugs, rebellious or sick. He had it made. Who knows, he might even get the top job one day.

  The girls chattered on, unconcerned at his lack of interest. Perhaps that was it, he thought. He wasn’t interested, and they didn’t mind his lack of interest, but he minded that they didn’t mind.

  Oh really, he thought, I’m just tired and grumpy. I’m not an excluded pariah in this family. They like horses. I don’t. It’s hardly the end of the world.

  Oliver continued to study Ruth, thinking how little she had changed. They had met when they were both at Cambridge. He’d been blown away, he remembered, by Ruth’s cleanness. Her unmade-up face looked newly scrubbed, and her thick blonde hair always smelt as if it had just been washed. She mostly wore it tied back with a rubber band, or held off her high forehead with an Alice band.

  She was nineteen when he first saw her but she’d looked much younger. They’d both been invited to tea in the garden of his tutor’s house. Oliver watched her handing round cake and was struck by how natural and carefree she looked, how long her legs were, how her hair shone in the sun. She was wearing an open-necked white shirt neatly tucked into jeans, the sleeves rolled up to expose lightly tanned, slightly freckled arms. No rings, no bracelets, not even a watch.

  Oliver was captivated by her, though he tried to hide it. He assumed she was about sixteen and told himself she would be silly and giggly. And it would be beneath his dignity, if not illegal, to hit on a schoolgirl. But then she came over to him with a plate of cake.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘There’s chocolate or lemon.’

  He shook his head. ‘Thanks, I won’t. Did you make them?’

  Her eyes widened and she laughed, showing even, pearly white teeth in healthy pink gums, like a toothpaste commercial.

  ‘No chance. I can’t boil an egg.’ She nodded towards his tutor’s wife. ‘Mrs Rafael made them, I think.’ Then she said, ‘Are you a tutor? You don’t look like an undergraduate.’

  ‘No, I’m neither. Post grad. PhD at Emmanuel. And you?’

  ‘PhD?’ She sounded impressed. ‘What on?’

  ‘Maynard Keynes. And you? What are you up to?’ Maybe she wasn’t at school. Too assured. Yet close up she looked, if anything, even younger.

  ‘Maynard Keynes. Really? Bretton Woods and all that?’

  He was impressed. She must be at a very good school if she’d heard of Maynard Keynes.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘You can’t just ask questions and not answer any.’

  ‘Sorry! I’m reading sociology. Girton. I love it.’ She put down the cakes and folded her arms, hugging her chest, and Oliver had to force his gaze away from the soft swell of her breasts under the thin cotton. She made him think of hayfields and daisies.

  Now, more than twenty years later, Ruth still looked years younger than she was, still mostly free of make-up, still slim and lithe, with not a single grey in her thick blonde hair. What was he complaining of?

  Oliver stood up, walked round to his wife’s side of the table. He kissed the top of her head. She looked up, surprised. ‘I’m off, work to do,’ he said. He hugged the girls. ‘Night, you two. Well done, Andrea.’

  At the door, he turned back to Ruth, ‘Give me a shout before you go to bed, won’t you, darling? With luck I’ll be done by then.’

  She nodded, but he didn’t miss the tiny cynical smile. She’s probably right, he thought. I always aim to go to bed when she does, but I nearly always fail.

  The following Wednesday, Oliver hosted an informal dinner at their Lambeth house for the Governor-General of Australia, Tom Attley, a blunt but jovial Aussie who had just chaired a Commonwealth trade conference, and who was in town for a few days. Oliver had read a pile of positioning papers and briefing notes from his Australia experts but he wanted to get a bit of lowdown, unfiltered, from those in the game. Tom had been a big mover and shaker in Commonwealth politics for years and would give it to him straight.

  Oliver had also invited the last British High Commissioner to Australia, now in the House of Lords. His third guest was a renowned historian and political journalist, particularly good on Australia.

  Kate was cooking the dinner. He’d now used her for another lunch at Carlton Gardens – the chef was still off sick – and also to do some canapés for a cocktail party, against the advice of Hobhouse, the head of Government Hospitality. Hobhouse had heard, from that snake Dennis, no doubt, about Kate’s outburst in the Lancaster House kitchens and had wanted to strike her off the approved list of caterers. But Oliver had insisted she stay. Kate was not, he said, to blame. Between his interfering with her menus, no one in the department listening to her and Dennis stoking rather than dousing the flames, she’d been powerless.

  Wednesday night’s dinner was, as usual, exactly what it should be, delicious but unostentatious. And the wine, Australian and chosen to flatter his guest, was excellent. Hobhouse could be sniffy about New World wines, but when Oliver had insisted, he had trawled the Foreign Office cellar stocks and come up with a top of the range Penfolds, and had declared it superb.

  Oliver was feeling relaxed and expansive when he walked into the kitchen at eleven-thirty. He had a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other.

  Kate was on her own, and on her knees, wiping the inside of the oven.

  ‘Hello, Cinderella. Why didn’t you bring some help?’

  Kate stood up. ‘Waste of taxpayers’ money.’ She looked impish, he thought. Her round face was flushed and her eyes flashed merrily at him. ‘There were only four of you, after all.’

  He poured the wine. She pulled off her gloves and took his offered glass.

  ‘Ah,’ she
said, her eyes closing for a second as she swallowed. Then, in an exaggerated Irish brogue, she said, ‘And here was I just thinking a glass for a working girl was exactly what the doctor ordered, but I wasn’t sure, at all, at all, she’d be getting one.’

  ‘I always give you one!’

  ‘I know.’ She dropped the Irish and said seriously, ‘It’s much appreciated too, I promise you. But the present is not a guarantee of the future, is it? There’s no reason why you should give me a glass of red every time. I might come to expect it as my due.’

  ‘It is your due.’

  ‘Have your guests gone?’

  ‘Yup. Everyone has to be up for breakfast meetings. Politics isn’t what it used to be.’

  ‘You mean there used to be long summer hols, late mornings, lots of eating for your country and port after dinner.’

  ‘Well, all of that, I suppose. And it’s not all changed. Plenty of eating and drinking still goes on, which you must be glad of. The big change is the paper load. It’s crazy. Even if you could read everything in your boxes every day, there’s no time to think about them.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She tipped her head slightly to the side and looked at him quizzically. ‘Maybe that’s all your fault. If you guys in government keep passing more legislation, you need more people to write it all up, get it through parliament, revise it, implement it, police it …’

  ‘Whoa, whoa! It’s nearly midnight and my brain is off duty …’

  But Kate was in full flow. ‘Of course there’s more paper! There’s more bureaucracy, which means more people, who earn their living writing more stuff.’

  They drank their wine and mulled over the need for good law and the insatiable demand of the political machine for over-legislation. Then Kate put her glass down with another ‘thank you’ and went to fetch her van, which she’d had to park a block away. She left Oliver sitting on the kitchen worktop, still drinking his wine. I should go to bed, he thought, but he didn’t. He poured another glass, topping Kate’s up at the same time.

  He enjoyed talking to Kate. She didn’t have a brilliant mind, but she was unafraid of him and she said what she thought. It was refreshing. His civil servants rarely gave their real opinions. He had the feeling that they were telling him what a whole ladder of committees in the department had concluded, but that none of them were really committed to the line.

  Kate’s interest in everything was refreshing too. Over just a few brief late-night chats in this kitchen, or the one at Carlton House, they had talked a lot about almost everything – including politics. Oliver generally avoided casual political discussion, especially with women. He was wary of strident Tory women preaching at him, or earnest Blair babes getting steamed up and shrill, but with Kate it didn’t feel like political discussion. She had a knack of making political points lightly and conversationally as though she were chatting at a bus stop, whether about health and safety in restaurants, or the illogicality of banning hunting but not fly fishing, or the extravagance of planting garish annuals in the public parks. Last time, they had got onto to the subject of prison, and the madness (Kate’s word) of sending women to jail.

  ‘OK, I agree you can’t just let off a murderess, but nearly all the women in prison are there for debt or aiding and abetting their blokes who do the real hard stuff. If a woman is in debt, why not give her some lolly? It’s got to be cheaper than locking her up, don’t you think?’

  ‘But what if she just spends it and gets into debt again? You’d be rewarding irresponsible behaviour.’

  ‘Sure,’ she’d said, ‘it’s a risk. But there’s a risk of her coming out of prison a drug addict or a real criminal, and that is expensive. So is keeping her kids in care, which will screw them up good and proper and maybe fit them for a life of crime too. And most of the women in clink are there because they can’t pay their TV licence or their debts to some loan shark.’

  Oliver smiled at the memory. He and Ruth hardly ever talked politics at home, and his daughters groaned and sang, ‘Boring, boring,’ if he raised anything remotely political. Or they listened politely, then slid out of the room.

  He and Ruth had grown apart politically. She was the daughter of a Yorkshire pig breeder who had started life as a farm labourer and pig man and ended it as a millionaire producer of pork products, still a staunch Labour supporter. Ruth had adored her father. She wasn’t exactly old Labour, but she hated New Labour’s championing of the City, and the ‘privatisation by the back door’ of public services.

  Oliver suspected that Ruth instinctively disapproved of people in ‘high places’, of which her husband was now one. She had inherited a good bit of her dad’s no-nonsense attitude. And of his obstinacy, thought Oliver. Oliver was privately convinced that had the old boy still been alive, he might have supported the Tories, or at least New Labour, but he had died in the early nineties, leaving his daughter in charge of his political affiliations, and she had decided he would never have voted for Blair and what she now called ‘your lot’.

  Until his conversations with Kate, Oliver had not realised that he missed the good-tempered debate he and Ruth had enjoyed in their early years. Before she lost her sense of humour, he thought. She would probably say before he got the power bug.

  Kate reappeared and picked up her glass. ‘Thank you. This is rather more than my due. It’s wonderful. It’s Australian, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. How did you know? Don’t tell me you’re a wine expert as well as a brilliant cook.’

  ‘I looked at the label.’

  He laughed, and she said, ‘Actually, I did recognise the wine. My ex-partner is Australian, a chef, and a bit of a wine buff. He came from the Hunter Valley and he introduced me to it.’

  ‘Tell me about him. Is he the father of Toby?’ He was pleased with himself for remembering Toby’s name.

  She told him how she and Chris had fallen for each other in a hot restaurant kitchen and lived together happily for two years.

  ‘And then suddenly I was pregnant, and Chris fled as though the fires of hell were at his heels.’

  ‘That must have been a truly horrible time.’

  ‘It was, but I’m glad now, and I’d hate him to resurface. But there’s not much chance of that. He’s back in Oz and married with a baby of his own, so Toby doesn’t exist for him.’

  ‘So you’re not in touch?’

  ‘No fear. I only know about him because I saw his photo – with wife and baby – on a restaurant magazine website.’

  ‘But he could find you the same way, couldn’t he? Or on Facebook or something?’

  ‘That’s precisely why I’m not on Facebook!’ She laughed. ‘Or anywhere else. It is also why I work for myself, and call my business Nothing Fancy rather than Kate’s Kitchen or McKinnon and Co, or something else obvious. And why I don’t have a website.’ She drained her glass and reached for his empty one. She put them into the sink and turned on the tap.

  ‘You don’t have a website? But how do you manage? Get business I mean?’

  ‘Word of mouth. The old fashioned way. It’s not bad.’

  ‘But Kate, are you sure you’re not worrying needlessly?’

  ‘No, I might be. I’m probably paranoid. Chris isn’t violent or anything, he’s actually a nice guy. Just weak. But I could not bear him muscling in on Toby, though now he’s got his own child, I guess there’s no real danger.’ She washed and dried the glasses, put the bottle into the box with the other empties, and took off her apron.

  She’s very disciplined, thought Oliver. Anyone else would have left a couple of glasses for the maid to deal with, but she cleans the oven, and takes away the rubbish and the empties.

  Kate had previously refused Oliver’s help with carrying her catering boxes to her van, but tonight, since she didn’t have Joan, she accepted. As they loaded the boxes of ingredients and equipment into the back of the van, and followed them with the empties and the rubbish sacks, Oliver said, ‘Who will help you the other end?’

  ‘I
’ll manage. It’s only when there are crates and crates of fresh food to go in the chiller, full cases of wine, boxes of dirties and umpteen bags of rubbish that I think a man might be a useful addition to my life.’

  Suddenly he wanted to know. ‘Is that the only reason, Kate?’

  She had her head and shoulders in the back of the van and she straightened up to look at him. The street lamp lit her face, close to laughing.

  ‘Well, I do miss the rumpy pumpy of course. Celibacy isn’t any fun at all.’

  Oliver was shocked, though of course he would never show it. Women, in his experience, joked about sex but didn’t admit to any personal desire. He had no idea how to respond, and felt he’d stepped into territory he should have stayed right out of. What if she thought he was making a pass at her? But she grinned and said, ‘But that’s all most men are good for, I guess. Humping boxes and women.’

  She slung the final rubbish bag into the back and slammed the doors. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I barely have time for Toby. Couldn’t possibly fit a man in too.’

  Relieved the conversation was back on safer ground, Oliver said, ‘I could never do what you do. The hours must be killing: long and anti-social to say the least.’

  ‘Sounds like politics,’ she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Indian party in the famous Durbar Court of the Foreign Office was set for June, not for another eight weeks. But it would be in the thick of the party season and Kate wanted to get her hire orders in. Exotic things: hot buffet dishes with lids like Eastern temple domes, Benares brass platters, gilded Champagne glasses which would be in short supply. But to plan the hire, she needed to plan the menu. And she needed to get her prices in to Julian Hobhouse. Until he had agreed them, she didn’t have a contract.

  Amal frowned at the long list of dishes.

  ‘The point is,’ said Kate, ‘since this is to be a sort of British Raj banquet, we have to have both Muslim and Hindu food, don’t we?’

  Amal shrugged. ‘Sure. The Brits were always happy to bastardise anything Indian. If you can have kedgeree for breakfast and a chicken tikka sandwich, why not?’